The critical mass of events endlessly argued over by economists resembles a picture puzzle in which reason and unreason, order and chaos, a foreseeable course of world events and sheer unfettered contingency appear as indistinguishable. Questions, exegetical efforts, and controversies of this kind weigh all the more heavily since they bear on the validity of one of liberal economic theory’s oldest and most deep-seated convictions: the conviction that market activity is an exemplary locus of integration mechanisms, harmonization, appropriate allocation, and hence social rationality, and that it demands to be represented in a coherent, systematic way. That is why it seems justified to identify, at the very heart of these disputes in the explanatory attempts occasioned by financial crises, the reprise of a problematic that only older attempts to establish a theodicy had been compelled to address with comparable [p.16] systematic rigor. Given that the capitalist economy has become our fate, given too our propensity to look to profit and economic growth to satisfy some remnant of the old hope for an earthly Providence, modern financial theory also cannot avoid confronting the baffling question of how, if at all, apparent irregularities and anomalies can exist in a system supposedly based on reason. In Leibniz’s terms: Which events appear to be compatible (and hence “compossible”) with which other events? Are relations between these events law-governed and if so, by which laws? And how can the existing economic world be “the best of all possible worlds”?

In any case, the questions that Kant used to test whether attempts at a theodicy were at all tenable would have to be directed, by analogy, to justifications of the current financial system. Here too it would be necessary to demonstrate that what seem to be “counterpurposive” and dysfunctional conditions are in fact nothing of the sort; or that they should not be judged as brute facts but as the “unavoidable consequence of the nature of things,” as tolerable side effects of a generally satisfactory world order; or that they are to be ascribed, in the end, to the flawed nature of “beings in the world,” the limited foresight of unreliable human actors.